The intoxication prevails in multiple areas of the Hollow Chamber, plus a few in the Archives. Yet they rarely feel sated. There’s too much to learn and discover with their bodies.
It’s a novel form of tutelage. His filthy vocabulary enhances their antics, but it never veers into lewd territory. Rather, it’s enticing, naughty how Malice recites what he plans on doing to do to her. It’s attractive how easily she silences him by taking his lips, splitting him wide and coiling her tongue with his. She’d never imagined herself capable of this, never perceived joining with someone like this, wild and wandering through the halls, exposed to danger and hidden from it.
They shouldn’t be doing this.
They shouldn’t be doing anything else.
Their escapades lead to snippets of affection. Malice takes her hand and laces their fingers as they walk down a stairwell. Wonder brushes her palm across the small of his back as she passes him. These random strokes of intimacy, touches and kisses and lovemaking, slip between the cracks of their mission.
However, their bouts of intimacy don’t override their dedication. If anything, these dalliances enhance productivity.
When he can’t find a book, she procures it for him.
When she can’t remember a fact, he reminds her.
When one of them locates a potential detail that might explain why Malice was reincarnated—how exactly had it happened? why did the stars allow it to happen?—they inform the other.
Unmistakably, the Fate Court hadn’t known about Malice’s past life. Otherwise, they would have banished him earlier, for that reason alone. To their kind, humans are inferior. Not to Wonder, Malice, or her friends, but to many others. Even if Malice is no longer mortal, his rulers would have seen his existence an insult, an accident of birth. Unless the stars commanded the Court otherwise, they would have tossed Malice from the Peaks without a second thought.
Malice and Wonder alternate between finding answers for him and answers for her. When they each have a theory about fate and free will, about deities and humans, about life and death, they compare notes. Historical accounts of their culture, analyses of combat, the strengths and weakness of immortality and mortality, their union with the stars, and maps of the Peaks.
Most of it, they already know and seek to review, in case they’ve missed a sliver of information during their upbringing. And some of it reveals hidden gems, such as techniques for targeting, the essence of compromise, and the choreography of negotiation.
But there’s a loophole missing, a key ingredient they’ve yet to sniff out.
Their days are comprised of gasps and quarrels and debates and chuckles. Wonder meditates, Malice breaks something in a fit of frustration. She drifts off, he calculates. She chides, he gets sarcastic. She puts him in his place, he makes her guffaw.
They hike into the Chamber’s abyss. They resurface, scouring the Archives. They come up for air, practicing archery in the forest or making each other climax against a tree.
And always, always, always they have something to say to each other.
***
She whines while rigged against the balustrade overlooking the acquisitions quarter, her backside rolling into Malice’s groin.
He bites the bell of her earlobe. “Like that?” he inquires, oxygen puffing from his lips and sliding across her nape.
To emphasize, he slants his movements at such an incline that Wonder goes breathless. “Like that,” she verifies, her thighs inching farther apart to accommodate each entry and withdrawal.
From behind, he brackets Wonder in, his arms flanking hers while grinding. His knuckles flex at either side of her hands, both of their grips choking the railing. The tempo of their bodies agonizes her, a prolonged exploration when it’s usually a passionate rush, as though they’ll run out of arousal or lose hold of each other any second—as though such rhapsody will never occur again. Their hips revolve into figure eights, pacing themselves and taking the conscious approach, searching one another like enigmas, gathering knowledge with every thrust.
Him, filling her. Her, surrounding him.
Planting her right heel on the balustrade’s lower rung enables him to vary the penetration, striking delicate areas that make her chant, her voice shivering across the repository. His torso rubs her spine, and her head lolls against his collarbones, her breasts pushing upward.
He murmurs, “Look at you, so happy. Can I make you happier? Hmm?”
In spite of the confident words, Malice is on tenterhooks for the answer. He likes being instructed, likes questing inside her, pulling these sounds from her.
She likes doing the same to him, so she beats her hips backward, inciting a raspy moan. His forehead lands against her neck in supplication, that tenor jostling from his tongue and sinking into her head. He hunches over, wrestling to keep his grip on the rail while pitching his hips forward, matching the leisurely glide of her own form.
Immortality fortifies them. Case in point, they’ve been at this escapade for an industrious thirty minutes, and they’re going strong enough that Wonder prepares herself for another hour or two of this madness.
“Please,” he begs into her flesh. “Please tell me.”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, like that.”
That spurs him on, and he cups her breasts. And they keep doing that, and that, and that.
Soon, they’ll need to eat and drink—and calm the Fates down. Not yet, though. Their cries convulse as a breeze slips through the hall, buffeting curtains and lanterns.
Public displays are common within casual settings of the Peaks, but not within formal institutions. Malice and Wonder would be flayed, degraded, judged. They would be deemed degenerates, misfits.
They would be called flawed. They would be likened to humans, with their imperfections and double standards…and hearts.
Fine by Wonder. She’s not giving up this version of her soul.
But she does vow to cleanse the balustrade with a cloth later. She’ll make Malice help her, as she’s done in every nook and cranny they’ve corrupted.
Outside the glass panes, constellations glitter, celebrating the day’s end. It had been a productive one in the arts and recreation section until Malice had given her that look. Or maybe Wonder had been the culprit, when she appraised his figure as he’d combed through his hair, the action pulling his shirt taut across the bluff of his chest. Maybe it had been when he’d caught her admiring him like that.
“That wandering gaze,” he’d complimented, tossing aside his choice of reading material.
And this is the result.
In between mewls, Wonder voices a wish. “At some point…we need…to do this…in a bed.”
Malice lifts his head, a smile curling through his voice. “Now where’s—”
“—the fun in that?” she finishes.
On a grunt of feigned outrage, he changes his mind. Wonder yips as he pulls out of her, encircles her middle, and hauls her against his torso. He proceeds to carry her back to the dormitory like this, her legs flopping, her laughter ringing through the corridors while Malice’s gifted tenor hums an impish tune in her ears.
In her room, they plummet onto the mattress in a fit of hysterics. Wonder lands atop Malice, her limbs astride his waist, their stomachs pumping. Her tresses spill all over his damp skin, and their hands clasp on either side of Malice’s head.